Digital Humanities and Culture (M.Phil.) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The scanned local newspaper I was checking last spring insisted that a nineteenth-century draper had sold 'tbe finest calico'. Our library's digitisation project relies on optical character recognition, and part of my job on scanning shifts is spot-checking the text it produces. Most errors are harmless, but searching the archive for 'the' would never find that advertisement, and a researcher searching for a family surname mangled in the same way might conclude it was never printed. That small gap between an image and the searchable text beneath it is the kind of problem I want to study properly, and it is why I am applying for postgraduate study in digital humanities.

My undergraduate degree was in English and French, and I came to digital methods through a specific object rather than a technical background. For my dissertation I worked with a photocopied Victorian household cookbook held in my county archive, whose owner had filled the margins with corrections, substitutions and notes about who had enjoyed which dish. I wanted to show how the printed recipes and the handwritten layer spoke to each other, so I taught myself enough of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines to mark up a sample of thirty recipes in XML, distinguishing printed text from additions, deletions and uncertain readings. The encoding forced decisions that a conventional essay would have let me avoid: whether a smudged word should be recorded as illegible or given a tentative reading, and how to show that a note in different ink was probably written years later. My supervisor encouraged me to write about these choices as part of the argument, and the dissertation earned a first-class mark within an overall 2:1 degree. It also showed me how limited my skills were; I relied on a basic template and could not yet transform the files into a readable web edition.

Since graduating I have worked at a public library, mostly on the returns and enquiries desk, with two weekly shifts on the digitisation project. The desk work is not glamorous, but it has taught me a great deal about how people actually look for things. Patrons rarely use catalogue terms; they ask for 'the blue book about canals' or a family history record they half-remember. Helping them has made me sceptical of the assumption that putting material online automatically makes it accessible. On the scanning side I have learned practical routines: consistent file naming, recording image resolution and condition notes, and flagging pages where bleed-through will defeat the OCR. I have started keeping a log of recurring recognition errors in the older newspaper runs, partly out of curiosity about whether they cluster around particular typefaces or damaged issues.

Alongside work I have been building skills in the evenings. I completed a free online introduction to Python and used it to count word frequencies across the cookbook transcriptions, a modest exercise, but enough to see why I need structured training in programming, data management and the theoretical debates around them. Reading Johanna Drucker's argument that data should be understood as 'capta', something taken and shaped rather than simply given, gave me language for what I had felt while encoding: every digital edition embeds interpretation.

Outside work I sing alto in a community choir and help sort its sheet music library, which has become an unplanned lesson in metadata when three arrangements of the same carol share one title.

At postgraduate level I would like to develop the technical competence to produce editions and archives that are honest about their uncertainties, and to think critically about who digitised collections serve. I bring careful textual training, everyday experience of public-facing heritage work and a habit of noticing where systems fail ordinary users. I am ready to spend the next year turning those instincts into rigorous method.